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I have a unique perspective of the Allouez Ore Docks, and that’s my usual perch on the last light hoop. Find out how the docks sound when the lake freezes. What it’s like to watch a 1,000 foot ore carrier passing by in the fog. Finally, I go in detail to tell the history of this place, where boats and trains danced by the lake.

Why write, who cares? The door asked… I guess I just didn’t have an answer. I’ll keep doing my thing, I thought, and you keep doing yours. Now, how best to capture the fingernail scratches around this padded room’s peep hole?

Under the star trails at our rooftop camp it was hard to believe that I was still living in a time when ghost towns–real ghost towns–were still engraved onto the sides of mountains. Below its cracked city streets courses the treasure that built the town and the poison that killed it. Cup your ears against the walls, be very still, and listen to the memory of a place called home.

A rare look into one of the last wooden grain elevators in the country, Globe. Along the waterfront in in Superior, Wisconsin, industrial technology spans almost the whole 20th century. If you enjoy history, lakeside skylines or just impressive carpentry…

Minneapolis was Mill City; flour mills and linseed mills dotted the landscape, and not just along the Mississippi River. To support the world’s biggest flour and linseed companies, a huge network of grain elevators were built by various interests just outside of the east bank’s industrial districts. I investigate these elevators and the factories immediately around them one by one. Welcome to Mill Hell.

Two things happened around Marquette, Michigan when the mining started: Native Americans were pushed off their land and miners got killed at work. Both of these factors filled this circa-1914 orphanage.

This is War City, a 10,000-acre bomb that leveled a swath of Indiana to sow the seed of a World War Two powder plant. Now it sits as, arguably, the largest abandonment in North America, with thousands of structures and miles of abandoned roads and sidewalks connecting them all. This place was so huge that I had to spend two days there, squatting overnight, just to see a fraction of its ruins.

Nopeming Sanatorium carried the burden of an epidemic for one of America’s key industrial boomtowns, before it was cut up, smashed-in, and swept under the rug. Now is the time for me to tell its story. Featured on Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures in 2015.

I go step by step through the coke making process, down to the job descriptions, to illustrate the functions of the plant. I talk about the history, the racism, the ad campaigns. All you need to know about Milwaukee-Solvay Coke you can learn right here.